On Media

Anchor retracts White House press claim

CBS News affiliate anchor Catherine Anaya has retracted her claim that White House press secretary Jay Carney receives questions from the press in advance of his daily press briefings.

Anaya, an anchor for Phoenix's KPHO 5, said she "inadvertently" gave the impression that all reporters submit questions ahead of time, when in fact she meant only to say that she had provided her question ahead of time.

"As a local journalist I had no issue providing my proposed question in advance because I wanted to make sure it was an appropriate [question] for a national briefing and I wanted to make sure it was appropriate for Mr. Carney but in discussing it with a staff member the night before we decided I would save it for the president," she wrote to Talking Points Memo.

"I was attempting to not waste national time on a local question but in my attempt at explaining that I unintentionally made it sound like that experience applied to everyone," she wrote. "That is my mistake and I own up to it."

KPHO also posted a retraction to its site but later took this down, telling TPM that it wasn't ready for publication.

Her retraction comes after The Weekly Standard promoted the remark in a blog item, which was featured on the banner of the influential website Drudge Report. Carney and several members of the White House press corps dismissed the claim as false.

"Briefings would be a lot easier if this were true! Rest assured, it is not," Carney tweeted.